According to the latest traffic reports for South Africa, the battle for the most popular website in the country is still going strong. The report, released by Effective Measure – which has recently rebranded to Narratiive and which partners up with IAB to offer official demographic and traffic statistic – shows that news outlets still occupy the top spots.

News24.com Ranks First in Website Traffic

According to the report, in May 2018, South Africa saw 44,709,249 unique browsers, which signifies an almost 6% rise from April 2018, with 4,816,354 average unique browsers on a daily basis, while Narratiive also measured a total of 1,238,417,346 page views. The mobile market is going strong, as the statistics show more than 70% in mobile page views and the average time that visitors remain on a website is a little less than 4 minutes. When it comes to demographic features, Narratiive has disclosed that 49% of visitors are female and 5% are aged between 55 and 64 years old. 54% of South Africans seem to often go online in order to use social media and 22% use the internet to arrange their travelling and book tickets.

In terms of website traffic, news24.com dominates the landscape with more than 6 million unique browsers and almost 63 million page views, while gumtree.co.za comes in second with roughly 5.3 million unique browsers and more than 130 million page views. 

Websites Need to Adapt to More Traffic and Mobile Visitors

These whopping numbers show that SA websites have the potential to attract not only a great amount from traffic from within the country, but also handle members of the diaspora and global traffic. Site visits are of course the holy grail for websites, but sudden spikes could lead to a website getting overwhelmed and crashing down. SA contenders for the top spot in website traffic are undoubtedly taking measures to mitigate similar scenarios, by investing in their website structure and employing specialised tools like a load balancer, which allocates traffic load across several servers to optimise traffic distribution and maximise application performance by avoiding too much pressure on any single resource. Interestingly, May’s statistics come as a surprise after April, when gumtree.co.za managed to claim the top spot with 5,257,828 unique browsers, leaving news24.com behind at almost 5.1 million unique browsers.

Interestingly, according to Narratiive, 6 out of the top 10 websites see more than 60% of their traffic come through mobile devices, which shows that companies should start gearing both their website layout and their server capabilities towards supporting numerous mobile visits. Considering that, as studies show, visitors take about 0,05 seconds to make up their minds about whether they will stay on the website they accessed or not and that 85% of adult users believe that websites viewed as a mobile version should be at least equally attractive as their desktop counterparts, SA companies need to take the mobile market more seriously.

South Africans seem dedicated to their favourite online portals, but dedicated mobile version of a company’s website, so that it can look well on the dimensions of a smartphone or a tablet, as well as adapt its functionality towards the options available on a mobile device, seems to be a must in order to attract even more visitors.